North Korea: The Hermit Kingdom

Dan Rather Gets A Rare Glimpse Of The Secretive Nation

(CBS)  And if the Great Leader is the sunshine, the Americans are the dark clouds on the horizon. You get that message every time you stroll down to the riverbank in Pyongyang, where the U.S.S. Pueblo, a U.S. spy ship captured in 1968, is moored.

The crew of the Pueblo was locked up, beaten and tortured for almost a year. For an American, it's hard to accept that the Pueblo has now been turned into a tourist attraction. We were told that, for a for a fee, the soldier who helped capture the ship will take you aboard and show you the quarters of Captain Bucher as part of the propaganda tour. The tour cost $78 cash, no credit cards. They don't exist.

There were no tours available at any price to areas where mass starvation has been reported. We were allowed to go into the countryside, but not to the jails that have been called gulags for political prisoners. One official did admit, reluctantly, that there have been food shortages in the past, though, from what we saw, the rice harvest this year appeared to be good. We also saw evidence that the food distribution system is rather antiquated.

Spend a week here, as we did, and you feel you're in a kind of time warp. A place a bit like where China was about 30 years ago. The government controls many aspects of life here: where you live, where you work, where you get medical treatment, where you go to school. Our required official government escort - we could go no place without him - was proper and polite but forceful, following orders. With a smile, he called himself our controller.

We saw that government control everywhere. We were constantly watched. But so are North Koreans, and the control starts early. We saw it at the Children's Palace, a beehive of after-school activity.

The Great Leader says the children are the future. And the Great Leader is always watching. He insists on commitment and discipline from his students. The most disciplined are rewarded with lead roles in the student production. They play sailors and soldiers, the future defenders of the homeland. They are talented, and they seem very committed.

There were plenty of real soldiers, enough to fill an American-size arena and then some, at the enormous North Korean stadium in Pyongyang.

At least 150,000 people showed up for another birthday celebration. But it was the children - the methodically, robotically trained children - who stole the show. What looked like a large TV screen across from us in the stadium, with constantly changing images of North Korea, were actually the effects created by thousands of school kids, playing flash cards on a giant scale, switching their cards on cue after cue to create one scene after another.

The sprawling pageant - almost an orgy of patriotism and nationalism - was designed to please the Great Leader. From what we could see, he seemed to be satisfied.

But where does the Great Leader want to take his country? To the future or the past? To peace or to war?

On our last night in Pyongyang, at a big party in the square, we saw fireworks and folk dancing - signs, we thought, of festivity and peace. But then we saw a tidal wave of respect for the late Great Leader, a man who has been dead for more than a decade.

And then we heard the chants. Far from peaceful, to an outsider, they seemed eerie and ominous, like the words of General Ri. "As long as the current hostile policies of the United States continue, war is inevitable."